American Life League has announced its 2010 pro-life blog award winners!
Drum roll, please!
First, the criteria, according to its site: “Pro-life Blog Awards exists to promote, encourage, impassion and reward pro-life bloggers. It also gives you access to the latest in pro-life news and information while supporting your favorite pro-life bloggers.”
For the past several weeks ALL first took your nominations and then had you vote. Winners in the following categories were…

And congratulations to Best Overall Pro-Life Blog – Catholic Fire!Catholic Fire has won a wonderful prize, courtesy of ALL: accommodations for 2 nights and 3 days at the Washington Court Hotel in downtown DC during the March for Life!
Awards will be given on January 21 in DC. Details are forthcoming. I’m honored to be the emcee!Then on January 22, Katie Walker of ALL and the winners have been invited to serve as panelists at the Blogs for Life conference, being held at Family Research Council headquarters. Their topic: “How to host a winning pro-life blog,” of course! More details forthcoming soon on that event, too.
Congratulations again to the Pro-Life Blog Award winners, and thanks to ALL for encouraging pro-life blogging by honoring its best and brightest.

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12 Responses to “Pro-Life Blog Award winners!”

Congratulations to Jean Heimann at Catholic Fire and all the pro-life bloggers who won awards. Jean has a great quote by St. Catherine of Sienna at the top of her blog:
“If you are what you should be, you will set the whole world on fire. Let the truth be your delight…proclaim it…but with a certain congeniality.
How difficult that can be sometimes… Thanks for the reminder, Jean.

The “reversals” also show that the ingestion of medication abortion drugs is never a sure thing when it comes to terminating a pregnancy. While anti-abortion activists tout the alleged “high complication rates” of the process, what they conveniently leave out is that the most common complication is that the patient remains pregnant, and that the protocol needs to be followed up with D&C or vacuum aspiration abortion in order to end the pregnancy….

Why is the “reversal” apparently so successful then? Primarily it is because those who are trying to continue the pregnancy are already in the midst of a failed medication abortion to start with….

“There’s no evidence of any demonstrable effect of the ‘treatment’ these anti-abortion centers are marketing,” Dr. Cheryl Chastine, a provider at South Wind Women’s Center in Wichita, Kansas, said. “The medical literature is quite clear that mifepristone on its own is only about 50 percent effective at ending a pregnancy. That means that even if these doctors were to offer a large dose of purple Skittles, they’d appear to have ‘worked’ to ‘save’ the pregnancy about half the time. Those numbers are consistent with what these people are reporting.”

“[The abortion pill] binds much more tightly to the progesterone receptor, to block it than progesterone itself does…. So there really is not much evidence to indicate, I’m really not aware of anything, that by increasing the amount of progesterone you’re gonna somehow block the effect of this drug….

I think this is really outside of standard of care to just begin doing this kind of treatment, without collecting more rigorous studies about its effectiveness.”

Note: The function of mifepristone is to block progesterone receptors (which is why, in an abortion pill reversal, an extra injection of progesterone is given to counteract these effects). Mifepristone “directly causes endometrial decidual degeneration, cervical softening and dilatation, release of endogenous prostaglandins, and an increase in the sensitivity of the myometrium to the contractile effects of prostaglandins. Mifepristone-induced decidual breakdown indirectly leads to trophoblast detachment, resulting in decreased syncytiotrophoblast production of hCG, which in turn causes decreased production of progesterone by the corpus luteum (pregnancy is dependent on progesterone production by the corpus luteum through the first 9 weeks of gestation—until placental progesterone production has increased enough to take the place of corpus luteum progesterone production).”